Omarska: Where Many Prayed to Die

“Men [were] tied together around a truck tire. The tire was set aflame, and the men burned to death. Another man had nails driven through his hands, shoulders, and knees; he was later doused with gasoline and thrown on a burning truck tire; he burned to death as well. Through the dirty window, Mr. Todorovic said he saw another man lying on the ground. The guards beat him, stomped on him, breaking his arms and fingers. Then they made that man pull down his pants and they forced a second prisoner to bite off his testicles. That second prisoner was Emin Jakupovic, 21, a refugee who just arrived in Karlovac. He did not bite the testicles off just the one man, but of five.”

KARLOVAC, Croatia — Sead Todorovic, a mechanic, survived. He was reunited Thursday with his baby daughter, Ariana, whom he last saw seven months ago, when she was 14 days old, and his wife fled with her into the hills.
During those seven months, while his daughter was cutting her teeth and discovering this strange, often wonderful world, Mr. Todorovic was discovering its capacity for evil.

Mr. Todorovic, 24, a Bosniak refugee from the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, says he saw many men beaten to death by Serb captors using sledgehammers. Others were whipped to death with electrical cables. He saw gangly bodies of men tortured to death, loaded into bulldozers and trucks. And he has seen worse.

You might find the graphic accounts of grotesque brutality at Omarska difficult to read, and you might want to stop here. Yet, as unsettling as they are, they are telling of the brutality of the Serbian side in the war in the former Yugoslavia.
Mr. Todorovic spent three months last summer at the most notorious Serb-run prison camp, a disused iron-mining complex near the Bosnian town of Omarska.

Hundreds died there before it was closed down four months ago; most of the prisoners were starved and beaten to death, according to accounts of those who survived. Mr. Todorovic estimates he saw between 200 and 300 men being killed; he and others say four or five times that many more were killed in total.

Until now, life at Omarska concentration camp has been a veiled horror to the outside world. But, with survivors’ relating their experiences, the horror is now being revealed.

Mr. Todorovic is among 3,000 former prisoners of Serb-run camps who arrived last week at a refugee center in Karlovac, a relatively peaceful city near Zagreb, the Croatian capital.

Most of the newly arrived refugees hesitate to talk about what they have been through as prisoners in the camps. Some are ashamed. Others fear for the lives of those men who have not arrived to safety. Others do not want to relive Omarska’s horror.

But Mr. Todorovic, and others who will talk, tell stories of almost unimaginable cruelty.

Their accounts cannot be confirmed independently, but they are readily corroborated by other former prisoners.

These men are providing the first detailed public accounts of the brutality that shook the world last summer when the first reports of Serb-run camps seeped out.

In reaction to such stories and other evidence, Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger last week called for a war-crimes tribunal to prosecute, among others, Drago Prcac, commander of Omarska camp for mass murder and torture.

A good day at Omarska, according to interviews with Mr. Todorovic and other former prisoners released, was when you got water, when you could go to toilet, and when you were not beaten. During his three months in the camp, “there were two or three such days.”

More often, it was a hell where many prayed that they would die. Those prayers often were answered.

About 3,000 men were at Omarska at its peak last summer, most of them Bosniaks who had surrendered when their villages came under Serb artillery attack.

Two groups of prisoners, of about 800 men each, were packed in two rooms on the second floor of a large building; truck garages and offices were on the first floor. The third group, also about 800 men, slept in the open, in front of that building.

Food arrived once a day, at noon, and 30 prisoners at a time were hustled from their quarters and escorted across a field into a dining area.

They had three minutes to eat: one loaf of bread for eight prisoners, and sometimes broth with a few pieces of cabbage. The soup often was so hot that the prisoners could not eat it before a guard declared “Enough!” and they were sent back to their quarters, hungry.

“You left lunch hungrier than when you went,” Mr. Todorovic said. While waiting in line to return to their quarters, some men tried to sneak blades of grass into their mouths. Many prisoners who survived Omarska lost 50 pounds or more.

Bathing was forbidden. In Mr. Todorovic’s three months at Omarska, he was allowed one formal bath. On that occasion, guards took the prisoners into a yard and turned fire hydrant water upon them. Many fell weakly to the ground.

Otherwise, bathing was as the prisoners could sneak it. One afternoon Mr. Todorovic went to the toilet and discovered that no guard was present; he figured he could was his underwear. A fellow prisoner lent him a contraband bar of soap, and he scrubbed.

He put on the wet underwear, then his black jeans. Moisture seeped through. When he emerged from the toilet, a guard noticed his wet pants, and he was beaten.

Mr. Todorovic said he was beaten at least a dozen times, often bloodily. He has scars, like many of the former prisoners. Beating and torture were the norm in Omarska, former prisoners say.

Another former prisoner, Maka, 34, who would not give his surname, said he was beaten because he told his fellow prisoners not to contribute to a “church fund.”

A Serb captor entered his room with a basket, saying he was collecting for “the church.” Many prisoners had secreted money, usually rolled up and slipped into a trouser seam from which they had removed several stitches.

For advising his fellow prisoners not to contribute, he was laid facedown on a corridor floor and beaten bloody. “I raised myself off the ground, to absorb the blows,” related Maka, a plumber. “The worst part was when I was told to spread my legs. The guard kicked me between my legs.”

When he was struck on the head, his head smashed the floor and he bled in spurts. The guard demanded that he collect money from the prisoners so that he would not be beaten again; he complied, and raised about $60.

Mr. Todorovic slept in a small bathroom on the second floor of the garage building. Through a dirty window, he said, he secretly watched many men being killed.

He said he saw five men tied together around a truck tire. The tire was set aflame, and the men burned to death. Another man had nails driven through his hands, shoulders, and knees; he was later doused with gasoline and thrown on a burning truck tire; he burned to death as well.

Through the dirty window, Mr. Todorovic said he saw another man lying on the ground. The guards beat him, stomped on him, breaking his arms and fingers. Then they made that man pull down his pants and they forced a second prisoner to bite off his testicles.

That second prisoner was Emin Jakupovic, 21, a refugee who just arrived in Karlovac. He did not bite the testicles off just the one man, but of five.

“I knew the guards were going to kill me if I refused to do what they asked,” he said.

He said the guards initially ordered him to drag five bodies of beaten men back and forth along a corridor. He dragged them as slowly as he could, out o f sympathy, but the guards ordered him to run, and beat him with rifle butts when he slowed.
They ordered him to dump the dying men into a pit of used motor oil, then drag them out. Then the guards told Mr. Jakupovic to drink the motor oil; he drank two handfuls. Then they filled a beer bottle with the oil and made him drink it.

They made him crawl into the pit of motor oil himself and squeal like a pig. They ordered him to squeeze the testicles of the prisoners, then bite them off.

He complied. He was ordered to eat the testicles. He ate those of two men; his captors were satisfied. He later vomited and had diarrhea; he could not eat food for three days.

He knew the men who tortured him. One was a high-school teacher. Another owned a pub in a village near his. That man asked him during the torture,” So, Emin, when are you going to come over for a beer at my bar?”

Mr. Jakupovic said the guards filled the mouths of the five dying men with axle grease and wired them shut, piercing their lips with the wire to do so. The guards later beat the five to death with a car steering column. Mr. Jakupovic was given a broom and a bucket of water and ordered to clean up the blood and body parts. He was then allowed to return to his quarters.
“It was just one of many things,” he said.

Mr. Todorovic and other prisoners described the Omarska complex as four buildings. One was the garage building, where the prisoners were kept. Another was an interrogation building. Another was a “white house” where men were killed. A third was a red building, a slaughterhouse, where cows were slaughtered, but where prison workers also found human body parts.

The interrogation building had five rooms, numbered 1 to 6. Prisoners were called to the building, and after a brief interrogation were sent to one of the rooms. Room 1 brought the mildest punishment, room 6 the harshest. Bodies often were brought from room 6, the former prisoners said.

On one occasion, according to Mr. Todorovic and Maka, guards ordered three prisoners to paint room 5 white. Then they beat the prisoners until the walls were red with blood.

The two told of a prisoner being forced to eat the shaved hair of another, lice and all.

They told of men being beaten to death with sledgehammers or with fire extinguishers.

One man would be ordered to walk straight ahead. He would be struck dead in the head. A second prisoner would be ordered to lay across his body. That prisoner would be struck on the spine, wounded, and then killed with a blow to the head. A third prisoner would be ordered to lay across the top; he would be bludgeoned to death. As many as 10 people would be killed this way.

Former prisoners said they sometime saw as many as 25 or 30 bodies at a time in a pile.

Mr. Todorovic was moved to another camp, in the Bosnian town of Manjaca, because of international pressure, where he spent four months. The Red Cross arrived and began feeding and taking care of the prisoners. The Red Cross “was like God and mother and father,” Mr. Todorovic said.

On Thursday, he kissed his daughter, Ariana. She smiled; she knew nothing of what had happened to her father. He said several times that it seemed strange to be free.